Goaltender performance is volatile, even with regular starters

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Jack Campbell in Edmonton. Darcy Kuemper in Washington. Ville Husso in Detroit. Alexandar Georgiev in Colorado. And lest we forget, whatever Toronto and Vegas are doing between the pipes.

This off-season saw a significant goaltending shuffle around the league, but it wasn’t always easy. The movement away from workhorses – a result owing in equal parts to the nearly impossible search for an elite goaltender and the higher confidence in platoon setups, where two capable goaltenders afford rest opportunities to one another as the season progresses – created the setup for a squeeze in the goaltending market. Add a flat salary cap due to limited hockey-related revenue growth, and you have the recipe for a wild off-season at the position.

Different markets have different expectations for their new goaltending faces, but several will be counted on to deliver this season. Pressure is quite high in Edmonton for Campbell, where the team feels on the precipice of a breakthrough in the Western Conference. Similarly high expectations will be placed on Kuemper in Washington after he snagged an increasingly rare long-term deal.

Historically we do not see a significant volume of goaltending movement, though it’s become a bit more common with the increase in platoons. That movement is quite valuable to those who study and analyze the position, especially from a data perspective.

Goaltenders are uniquely impacted by the defensive structure and systems in front of them, and measures like raw save percentage tend to say more about the overall defensive performance of the team than the goaltender.

More recently, we have utilized measures like goals saved above expectations, where we measure a goaltender’s production by